African Americans clearly benefited from both World War II and the Cold War. But others were cast out (Japanese Americans and communists, for example) as an incident of community construction. ..…

During the Cold War, if Americans were to learn that the Soviet Union, which itself was a national-security state, was engaged in any or all of those dark-side practices, no one would have been surprised. ..…

In the early 1980s, the danger of nuclear war emerged as a matter of widespread public concern, with one survey finding that 76 percent of Americans believed nuclear war was “likely” within a few years. Millions of people took political action to stop the Cold War arms race,..…